Georgia O’Keeffe was an American modernist painter who was notorious for her paintings from flowers to New York City skyscrapers. Born in Wisconsin, O’Keeffe desired to be an artist once since she was out of high school. She then attended the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905 and later traveled to New York to study at the Art Student’s League. While there, she reflected realism in her paintings but later grew into a modernist and displayed abstraction in her work. She studied with artist and educator Arthur Wesley Dow who was a staunch believer in modernism. O’Keeffe then had a teaching job at Columbia College in South Carolina after studying with Dow in New York. In 1916, renowned photographer Alfred Stieglitz exhibited her abstract work and …show more content…
This is a painting of Lake George and the trees and mountains reflecting on the water. There are a great amount of vivid colors from greens to blues to pinks. I found this interesting and compelling because I like the way she depicted the landscape. While it is abstract, it shows what the lake would look like at sunrise or sunset. The colors were also compelling to me because they were so different and apparent. On the left side of the painting is dark bluish greens and moves into purples, pinks and oranges. In the painting, the trees are reflecting on the water but they are not equal to the trees on the land above it. Also, a portion of the trees on the land do not appear on the water. This immediately caught my eye and got my attention. I thought that this was an interesting use of abstraction. The shape of the trees and lake is also interesting. The perspective of the painting gives a sense that you are close and there instead of just looking at the lake straight on. It is at the perspective that shows the mountains appearing smaller from left to right. This creates a shape that is similar to a flower, similar to one she would paint. I think if she was trying to give a flower-like shape that the meaning would be that nature is everywhere or everything. A lake with mountains looks like a flower and a flower can look like mountains, showing their